The Battle For Water

In the 21st century, our water is becoming a commodity. Some want to profit from it and others are ready to go to war over it, but every form of life must have it. Who will control this source of life?

We are taught in school that the Earth has a closed
hydrologic system; water is continually being recycled through rain and
evaporation and none of it leaves the planet's atmosphere. Not only is
there the same amount of water on the Earth today as there was at the
creation of the planet, it's the same water. The next time you're
walking in the rain, stop and think that some of the water falling on
you ran through the blood of dinosaurs or swelled the tears of children
who lived thousands of years ago.

While there will
always be the same amount of water, we can render water unusable for
ourselves and for the planet. The growing scarcity of potable water
stems from a variety of causes. Per capita water consumption is
doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population
growth, which itself is exploding. Technology and sanitation systems,
particularly those in the wealthy industrialized nations, have
encouraged people to use far more water than they need. Yet even with
this increase in personal water use, households and municipalities
account for only 10 percent of water use.

Industry
claims 20 to 25 percent of the world's fresh water supplies, and its
demands are dramatically increasing. Many of the world's fastest
growing industries are water intensive. For example, in the U.S. alone,
the computer industry will soon use over 396 billion gallons of water
each year.

Nonetheless, it is irrigation that is the
real water hog, claiming 65 to 70 percent of all water used by humans.
Increasing amounts of irrigation water are used for industrial farming.
These water-intensive corporate farming practices are subsidized by
governments and their taxpayers, and this creates a strong disincentive
for farm operations to move to conservation practices such as drip
irrigation.

Along with population growth and
increasing per capita water consumption, massive pollution of the
world's surface water systems has placed a great strain on remaining
supplies of clean fresh water. Global deforestation, destruction of
wetlands, dumping of pesticides and fertilizer into waterways, and
global warming are all taking a terrible toll on the Earth's fragile
water systems.

The world is running out of fresh
water. By the year 2025, there will be 2.6 billion more people on Earth
than there are today. As many as two-thirds of those people will be
living in conditions of serious water shortage, and one-third will be
living with absolute water scarcity. Demand for water will exceed
availability by 56 percent.

Water as a commodityThe
combination of increasing demand and shrinking supply has attracted the
interest of global corporations who want to sell water for a profit.
The water industry is touted by the World Bank as a potential
trillion-dollar industry. Water has become the “blue gold” of the 21st
century.

The move to privatize water coincides
with the rise of the Washington Consensus as the dominant world
economic philosophy. This philosophy calls for trade and investment
liberalization, and turning responsibility for social programs and
resource management over to the private sector. In this case, it is an
assault on the ancient commons of water.

Global
trade agreements have become perhaps the most important tool for
corporations trading in water and their allies. All of the
multinational governing bodies, the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), and the
World Trade Organization (WTO), define water as a commodity. As a
result, water is now subject to the same rules and regulations
governing other commodities like oil and natural gas. Under these
combined international rules, a country cannot prohibit or limit the
export of water without risking censure by the WTO. Nations are also
restricted from denying the import of water from any country. NAFTA's
“proportionality clause” means that if a country turns on the tap to
export its natural resources, it cannot turn off the tap until it runs
out of that resource.

In addition, the push to
privatize water services will be greatly enhanced by new rules
governing cross-border trade in services at the WTO, known as the GATS
(General Agreement on Trade in Services). Under the proposed GATS
rules, not only will governments face added pressures to deregulate and
privatize their water systems, but once a city's water services have
been taken over by a foreign-based corporation, efforts to take these
services back into public hands will invite severe economic penalties
under the WTO.

Leading the charge for privatization
are three big transnational corporations based in Europe: Vivendi,
Suez, and RWE. All three have systematically bought out smaller rivals
to become the dominate powers in the business of water all over the
globe. The long-range strategy of these companies began with their
efforts to take over the public water systems in Third World countries
where they hoped to position themselves as the saviors of the water
crisis. Instead, a series of private-sector fiascoes in the Third World
derailed their plans.

The case of Buenos Aires is
especially instructive. Buenos Aires was to be the flagship operation
of Third-World water privatization. Suez, through its subsidiary Aguas
Argentinas, took over the Buenos Aires water and sewage system in 1992.
A common argument for privatizing water systems is that, unlike the
cash-strapped public sector, the private sector has the capital
necessary to update or refurbish aging water systems. But public
sources like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other
smaller banks supplied 97 percent of the $1 billion necessary for the
Suez privatization experiment. Suez did expand water and sewage service
by a small increment, but failed to meet its projected targets in both
areas. Nonetheless, the company managed to reap annual profits of
around 25 percent in the mid-1990s. Recently, Suez announced that it
plans to pull out of Argentina because the country's currency crisis
has cut into its profits. There have been other private-sector fiascoes
in places like Johannesburg, New Delhi, Manila, and most famously in
Cochabamba, Bolivia.

The effort to privatize Third
World water systems has become a target of civil society protests.
Representatives of an international civil society network appeared at a
meeting of chief executive officers at the World Water Forum in Kyoto,
Japan, in March. The group took over the microphones and offered a
series of testimonials about the impact of water privatization around
the world. Toward the end of the event, a water activist from Cancun,
Mexico, stepped to the microphone and held up a glass of pitch-black,
putrid-smelling water. He explained that he had taken the water from
his home tap in Cancun, where Suez runs the municipal water system. He
then requested that the moderator pass the glass of black, smelly water
up on stage to the CEO of Suez, inviting him to drink it.

Targeting First World waterThe
big water companies are now changing their strategy and concentrating
their operations and their investment on more secure markets in North
America and Europe. Eighty-five percent of all water services in the
U.S. are still in public hands. That's a tempting target for
conglomerates like Suez, Vivendi, and RWE. Within the next 10 years,
they aim to control 70 percent of water services across the United
States.

They have positioned themselves to move
aggressively. Vivendi, Suez, and RWE have bought up the leading U.S.
water companies, U.S. Filter, United Water, and American Water Works,
respectively. These water companies had largely serviced small towns
and communities, but under the tutelage of the global giants they have
become the engines for privatization in the United States (see page 16).

When
transnational water conglomerates take over a municipal water system,
it feels like a local problem, but because the same corporate players
are targeting communities all over the world, we must build alliances
and connections, learn from one another, and start to build a frontal
attack.

At the Polaris Institute, we propose a
three-pronged strategy. First, develop a water-alert network so we can
know where companies are operating and where they are going next. How
are they going to move? And how can we get ahead of them?

Second,
we need water-action teams that bring citizens together to build local
water-watch coalitions and develop campaigns to protect their water
supplies and services from conglomerates. Then we should link those
local campaigns with the national campaigns of groups like Public
Citizen or the Council of Canadians.

Third, we
need to offer alternatives. It is not enough to say we want to defend
our public water systems against private takeovers. There are problems
with public water systems, and we must find new ways of revitalizing
them in our own communities through citizen participation. Engaged
citizens can act as watchdogs for their local water systems.

Our
local actions should be informed by three global principles. One is
water conservation. We cannot kid ourselves about water scarcity. Water
may be abundant in one place, but it's scarce in others. Water
conservation must be a top priority.

The second
principle is that water is a fundamental human right. People need water
to live. Water must be provided equitably to all people and not on the
basis of the ability to pay.

The third principle
is water democracy. We cannot leave the management of our most precious
resource in the hands of bureaucrats in government or the private
corporations, whether or not they are well intentioned. We, the people,
must preserve this special trust, we must fight for it, and we must
take our proper role and demand water democracy.

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Maude Barlow, national chair of the Council of Canadians, and Tony Clarke, director of the Polaris Institute, are co-authors of Blue Gold: The Corporate Theft of the World's Water.
This article is adapted from presentations made by the authors at the
Water for Life conference in New York, September 2003, co-sponsored by
Resurgence magazine and the Omega Institute.